Another glitch mislabels H1B lottery selections as ‘Submitted’, here's what to do

Notifications for H1B lottery selections started being sent out on March 28. They're expected to roll over until April 1.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) introduced the new myUSCIS organisation accounts on February 28, with H1B Visa registrations kicking off for the FY 2025 on March 6. The registration deadline was initially set for March 22, but due to a technical glitch, the period was extended by three days. Like always, selected registrant results for the H1B lottery started rolling out before the official press release was made public.

The H1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. (File Photo)

Notice alerts for selected cases started pouring in on March 27; the emails followed on March 28. The USCIS intimated H1B cap petitioners for FY 2025 that notifications would continue dropping “over the next few days prior to April 1” via a tweet. Eventually, another official announcement revealed that 20 million online filings had been registered, encouraging the officials to continue transitioning to the digital format. While it undoubtedly opened up more opportunities for interested registrants to file their forms online via myUSCIS, a new tumultuous development trailed behind.

Immigration attorney Emily Neumann took to her X (formerly Twitter) profile to keep everyone posted about the FY 2025 H1B lottery selections. In her findings, she stumbled upon another glitch that visually reflected contradictory results online. Some selected cases were still marked ‘Submitted’ instead. Showing applicants the ropes, she wrote online: “By clicking on View submission for submitted cases, we have unearthed additional selection notices.”

This meant that a bucketful of cases, despite being registered as ‘Submitted,' had actually been selected.

A few hours later, she posted another update that email notifications and Selections were coming as of 8:12 am, Saturday. This time, these cases were rightly marked as ‘Selected’. Yet, she went through the trouble of manually tallying each submission to check for additional registrations that may have been mislabeled like before.

As of March 30 (March 31 at 12:52 am IST), she had not found any other selections manually. It led her to wonder if the glitch had finally been fixed. More updates are awaited.